In the last few weeks, Slim Boukhdhir, the 39-year old imprisoned blogger and journalist, is reported to have been subjected to an unusual level of harassment by prison authorities in the Sfax prison where he is serving the one-year sentence imposed by a Tunisian court on December 4th, 2007. Boukdhir was charged with “aggression against a public employee” and “affront to public decency”.

His wife, Dalenda Boukhdhir, told Global Voices that the prison authorities placed Slim in “dry cell” for three days, from 20-23 March, 2008, turning off the water in his cell so he couldn't wash. These measures have further aggravated the already serious health condition of her husband, she said. Mme Boukdhir has complained to the Red Cross about prison conditions and is hoping the Red Cross staff will visit Slim at the prison.
Slim Boukhdhir has staged several hunger strikes to protest the inhumane conditions under which he is being detained. His most recent hunger strike was called off on February 22, 2008, on the urging of his wife.

“Preventing a prisoner from seeing his family or having a clean cell is a flagrant violation of human rights,” Reporters Without Borders has said, “the injustice of sentencing this journalist to a year in prison is being compounded by his conditions of detention and staging a hunger strike has become his only way of making himself heard.”

During her March 13th visit to her husband, Slim Boukhdir, a journalist incarcerated in Sfax prison, Dalenda Boukhdhir saw that the prison authorities’ relentlessness knew no bounds: Slim told her that not only he still confined to a foul and cramped cell, but for the last three days, he had no access to a water source. The prison authorities cut off the water, and unlike his fellow prisoners, he could not leave his cell to wash himself elsewhere.

So Slim Boukhdhir planned a new hunger strike to protest against this new affront to his basic rights, a project his family and friends urged him to abandon. And today, the prison authorities allowed him the food basket his mother brought, a sign that the prisoner agreed to renounce his strike, and also a sign that Slim Boukhdhir is tossing the ball back to the human rights defenders, into their court. It is up to us to demand an end to the inhuman conditions of incarceration. It is up us to do all we can to secure his freedom.